A year ago, at TradeMark Africa’s Trade Development Forum in Kigali, I was struck by how little patience remained in the room for incrementalism. More than 300 leaders from government, business and development institutions, and representing over 40 countries, were aligned on one point – Africa can no longer afford borders that slow its own trade. The call was urgent: stop debating integration and start building No-Stop Borders.
That moment captured a wider truth. The global trading system is becoming less forgiving of small, fragmented markets. Trade policy has returned to geopolitics. Industrial strategy is back. Supply chains are being de-risked, and access to markets is increasingly shaped by standards, traceability and climate-related rules, not tariffs alone. For African producers seeking to move from exporting raw materials to value-added goods, competitiveness will be measured by the quality of the systems that move goods across borders.
It also sharpened a very important point: that Africa’s credibility in trade is won or lost at the border and along its corridors. At the same time, borders remain the most visible point of inefficiency in Africa’s trade ecosystem, and also its greatest opportunity.
This matters because Africa is increasingly in a position of demand for its products, not least the minerals that will underpin the world’s next big technological leaps. The question is: how to leverage this into significant and broad-based economic returns? Critical to this is building the regional value chains necessary for downstream value addition. This involves treating the African Continental Free Trade Area as a serious trading bloc, one that builds interoperable systems and bargains from strength, at a time when multilateralism is strained. Also crucial, is making a reality of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 Second Ten-Year Implementation Plan, described as the “decade of acceleration”.
No-Stop Borders sit at the centre of this agenda. They deal with the practical obstacles that make integration expensive for businesses: paperwork that multiplies across agencies, repeated inspections, discretionary decisions, informal charges, and the uncertainty that hits small businesses first and hardest. When borders and corridors operate as a single process, much of that friction has nowhere to hide. The cost of inaction is large. UN Trade and Development estimates that logistics costs account for around 29% of the price of goods traded within Africa, compared with approximately 7% for goods traded outside the continent. It also finds that non-tariff barriers restrict African trade three times more than tariffs. In plain terms, Africa taxes its own trade through delay, duplication and unpredictability.
Building No-Stop Borders is multifaceted: technical, political and institutional. As always, practical implementation starts with movers and momentum, region by region, corridor by corridor, beginning where alignment is strongest and where scaling works. The core elements are known; the key is to bring them together. Align procedures and standards; move to joint controls and interoperable data; then build the trust frameworks through risk management, authorised operators and mutual recognition – all allowing compliant goods to move with fewer stops.
This is how the estimated $20 billion in annual gains from tackling non-tariff barriers becomes real. No-Stop Borders are, at heart, about trust: in documents, data, enforcement, and the integrity of African corridors.
Economic integration also answers the question of who gets to participate. If value chains do not create pathways for small businesses, women and young people, integration becomes a project for large firms alone, while the costs of uncertainty fall first on those with the least ability to absorb them. Systems that reduce discretion and make compliance affordable widen participation by design. This last year, TradeMark Africa supported around 60,000 small-scale traders in 13 countries to access markets safely and formally, with practical support on documentation, standards requirements and market rules.
Pan-Africanists from Kwame Nkrumah to Julius Nyerere understood that unity is strategy. Today’s task is to translate that strategy into functioning systems that deliver competitiveness, jobs and public revenue. And to show it in outcomes that people recognise, such as what predictable clearance does to investment decisions; what fewer stops do to food prices; and what discretion does to the survival of small traders.
This work will be made real by the people who keep trade moving – border officials, traders, freight operators and firms – and by African governments and agencies that TradeMark Africa works with across 20 countries. We thank our continental and international partners, whose backing turns these ambitions from an idea into delivery.
H.E. Hailemariam Desalegn Boshe
Board Chair & Former Prime Minister of Ethiopia